RecruitMilitary: Enhancing the job search experience for military veterans

About RecruitMilitary

RecruitMilitary is a wholly owned subsidiary of Bradley-Morris, Inc. (BMI), the largest military-focused recruiting company in the United States. RecruitMilitary helps organizations connect with America's best talent — its veterans. The company offer its services free of charge to veterans and their spouses to support them during their job search and host the nation's largest single-source veteran database, with over 1,400,000 members.

RecruitMilitary connects organizations with veteran talent through over 30 products and services, all of which are fueled by their job board. This job board, with over 1,400,000 members, is core to RecruitMilitary's overall business. Though services sold directly to the job board represent a small percentage of annual sales, the candidate talent pool that the job board collects touches 100 percent of the business' sales. "If we don't have a healthy, active, and growing job board population, we don't have the supply of veteran talent we need to deliver to our clients across our suite of services," says Mike Francomb, Senior Vice President of Technology at RecruitMilitary and a U.S. Army veteran.

With veteran unemployment at a 50-year low, it had become increasingly challenging and expensive for RecruitMilitary to grow their veteran job seeker database and keep those veterans actively applying to client jobs. Being a data driven company, they saw its existing search functionality was no longer producing the desired results for clients and began to receive client feedback about decreased candidate activity.

"The MOS search is a fantastic tool, especially for transitioning military personnel."

—Mike Francomb, Senior Vice President of Technology, RecruitMilitary

At this point, RecruitMilitary decided it was time for a change. The company began a major overhaul of its candidate experience and soon realized it needed to improve its search capabilities to better connect the right candidates with the right opportunities. "With machine learning and AI becoming such a part of the conversation in recruiting, we felt compelled to consider who might help us with this. When I learned that Google was developing a tool for veterans that would be leveraging their search, I knew we needed to check the technology out," notes Mike.

This tool for veterans refers to the functionality within Cloud Talent Solution that allows users to search by U.S. military occupational specialty code (MOS, AFSC, or NEC). Transitioning veterans are able to input their MOS code to see available civilian jobs that are relevant to the skills they gained in the military.

"It was clear to us we needed to begin adopting machine learning and more advanced search capabilities into our products and operations. The HR Tech space is shifting that way fast, and we want to be at the forefront," states Mike. "As we researched paths to take and learned of Google's operating philosophy leading with AI, it made a lot of sense to go with a leader."

RecruitMilitary began leveraging Talent Solution in mid-2018 to enable veterans to more easily find jobs that closely match their experience and interests.

"The results of the Google job search solution compared to our previous search are tremendous."

—Mike Francomb, Senior Vice President of Technology, RecruitMilitary

Enhanced the experience for veterans

For RecruitMilitary, the MOS code translation capability was one of the most compelling parts of Talent Solution. "Google's inclusion of MOS search raised the value greatly for us," recalls Mike. "For over 15 years, we've evaluated every translator that was brought out and always turned it away because they didn't provide useful results for job seekers. As we started to use Google search, we saw the dramatic difference in results."

This job search for veterans functionality enables transitioning service members to enter their code (MOS, AFSC, NEC) directly into RecruitMilitary's search bar and see relevant civilian jobs available on the site.

"The MOS search is a fantastic tool, especially for transitioning military personnel," says Mike. "We're excited about how this tool provides such a strong starting point for veterans in their job search."

Improved candidate engagement

"The results of the Google job search solution compared to our previous search are tremendous. Our job seekers are getting a much better experience, and we see that meaning more veterans get connected to jobs with our clients. We know this because our number of daily job applications has grown by 78 percent," explains Mike.

"Knowing that we have a tool that's going to learn and get better as more of our job seekers use it is exciting. That's tremendous ROI to receive for a lean development staff."

—Mike Francomb, Senior Vice President of Technology, RecruitMilitary

RecruitMilitary has also seen significant improvements across many other business metrics since going live with Talent Solution. Total daily job views are up 86 percent, and daily count of job views from logged in job seekers has increased by 71 percent. RecruitMilitary has also seen dramatic increases in the number of daily registrations for their job board, with total daily organic registrations up 48 percent.

This jump in candidate activity and engagement is just the beginning. By investing in Cloud AI, RecruitMilitary will continue to see these results improve along with the underlying technology. "Knowing that we have a tool that's going to learn and get better as more of our job seekers use it is exciting," Mike comments. "This means that we will reap benefit for work done over time, and so will our clients and veterans who use our job board. That's tremendous ROI to receive for a lean development staff."

Established a strong relationship

"Our development team had to work hard to get the technology implemented, but Google's team and process made it an excellent and streamlined experience," notes Mike.

RecruitMilitary worked closely with the Google Cloud team throughout implementation and has formed a strong relationship since. "A lot of companies like to make promises about how they will include you in things they do, but all too often, once you've implemented, you're forgotten. That hasn't been the experience with Google at all. They want to help find the stories that will allow both of us an opportunity to share how we're winning by working together."

About RecruitMilitary

RecruitMilitary is a wholly owned subsidiary of Bradley-Morris, Inc. (BMI), the largest military-focused recruiting company in the United States. RecruitMilitary helps organizations connect with America's best talent — its veterans. The company offer its services free of charge to veterans and their spouses to support them during their job search and host the nation's largest single-source veteran database, with over 1,400,000 members.